Thursday, June 20, 2013

Querelle - Music & Art

It had been a while since I thought of the 1982 film "Querelle," directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or that I owned the soundtrack for it. But a Facebook friend posted on my wall about a Christie's auction of some of the drawings and photos that Andy Warhol used to create the enchanting cover image for the LP. So that started me googling different elements of the art and the music.

Searching on the title "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves" (on Amazon) I was surprised to find it has inspired a number of recordings over the years, I'm sure more than appeared on the nine albums I show in the graphic below.

But, let's get back to Warhol's art for the film, whose homoerotic plot likely inspired the direction. For example, a poster for the film was blatantly phallic, with the fetching Brad Davis.

More Brad Davis, above center...couldn't resist not sharing this one.

And the resulting art and poster became iconic, often reproduced for posters, etc.

As the Christie's auction runs only for a few more days, I...er...borrowed the images they had up for sale, with starting bids ranging from $2,400 to $16,000. I'm just glad the images were on their site so we mere mortals could see them. Warhol often took scores of photos, which later inspired the drawings, and here are some of both.

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Obscure points of interest: - Peer Raben, who composed the songs, was Rainer Werner Fassbender's lover at the time of the movie. - Unfortunately both songs were nominated to the 1984 Razzie Awards for "Worst Original Song". - Genet himself said that he never saw the film, commenting, "You can't smoke at the movies."